1.8 Kardashians

Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. In an ideal, frictionless universe, we’d determine a Kardashian by measuring the percentage of all broadcast media, conversations and thoughts dedicated to Kim Kardashian. In practical terms, we can approximate a Kardashian by using a tool like Google Insights for Search – compare a given search term to Kim Kardashian and you can discover how small a fraction of a Kardashian any given issue or cause merits.

It’s possible to receive far less attention than Somali famine receives in this analysis – enter your name into Google Trends alongside Kardashian, and you will likely generate a zero… or, at least, I do. I command microKardashians, perhaps nanoKardashians of attention, as do most of us.

I wagered that the mythical iPhone 5 is our only hope to compete with the undeniable and incomprehensible star power of the Kardashians. In fact, over the last 12 months, the Kardashians and the iPhone 5 have captivated our days an equal amount. On average, the tantalizing next-generation Apple phone has generated one full Kardashian of attention. Narrow that range to just news stories, and the iPhone 5 actually generated 1.8 Kardashians.